Reflections on
World Refugee Day
By President Barack Obama
Last Wednesday marked World Refugee Day.
If you've been fortunate enough to
have been born in America, imagine for a moment if circumstance had placed you
somewhere else.
Imagine if you'd been born in a
country where you grew up fearing for your life, and eventually the lives of
your children.
A place where you finally found
yourself so desperate to flee persecution, violence, and suffering that you'd
be willing to travel thousands of miles under cover of darkness, enduring
dangerous conditions, propelled forward by that very human impulse to create
for our kids a better life.
That's the reality for so many of
the families whose plights we see and heart-rending cries we hear.
And to watch those families broken apart in real time puts to us a very simple question: are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms, or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together?
Do we look away, or do we choose to
see something of ourselves and our children?
Our ability to imagine ourselves in
the shoes of others, to say “there but for the grace of God go I,” is part of
what makes us human.
And to find a way to welcome the
refugee and the immigrant – to be big enough and wise enough to uphold our laws
and honor our values at the same time – is part of what makes us American.
After all, almost all of us were
strangers once, too. Whether our families crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific, or
the Rio Grande, we’re only here because this country welcomed them in, and
taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look
like, how our last names sound, or the way we worship.
To be an American is to have a
shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal, and all of us
deserve the chance to become something better.
That’s the legacy our parents and
grandparents and generations before created for us, and it’s something we have
to protect for the generations to come.
But we have to do more than say
“this isn’t who we are.” We have to prove it – through our policies, our laws, our
actions, and our votes.